


The Star and the Magician

by yhlee (etothey)



Category: Tarot (Divination Cards)
Genre: Fairy Tale Style, Gen, Worldbuilding, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:06:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28305774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etothey/pseuds/yhlee
Summary: When the constellations above the Sea of Dust begin to dim, a Star seeks the Magician who may be responsible.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 16
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	The Star and the Magician

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Siremele](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siremele/gifts).



Once upon a wondering, a Star dwelled amid the night's crystal spheres. Her special duty was to guide sailors across the Sea of Dust and safely to one of the ports that ringed it. The Sea of Dust was home to Estervenee of the Ivory Towers and the Fortress-City of Kvafr with its lion-headed cannons, the Yarith Witch-Citadel and the Floating Villages that have no name. But the Star's particular charge was Marag the Black, a city of libraries, whose scholars spoke all the languages of the world. This duty she carried out well and truly, era after era, without complaint.

One day in the passing of the centuries, however, the Star noticed a dimming of the crystal spheres. At first she blamed her imagination. The celestial court did not, strictly speaking, approve of its denizens having _ideas_ , but the Star had the long keen vision of all her kind, and a most unseemly curiosity. She observed the machinations of viziers and vandals, conflicts between paladins and priests, the curious rituals of necromancers and knights. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to walk on the world, clothed in flesh. It might only have been a distant dream, easily dismissed, if not for the fact that others of her kind began to vanish.

The Star could no longer deny her observations. The very constellations were coming unmoored. The tides of the Sea of Dust grew dimmer and dimmer, no longer lit by starlight and moon-might. For the first time in her eons of existence, the Star began to fear.

Rather than waiting to be the next to disappear, the Star sent word to her superiors in the celestial court, by means of a white-and-blue bird of her conjuring. The bird winged away, but the very next night it fell back toward her, lifeless, an arrow of fire and phoenix down through its breast. Then the Star knew that no help could be expected from that quarter.

She was sorry to leave her posting, for she took great pride in her work, but the matter was too urgent. In a shower of light she descended to the earth, at the edge of the Sea of Dust. Even in human guise her celestial nature shone through, for her dark hair glimmered as though nebulae were caught in it, and her eyes were the color of deepest dusk. But she had certain protective magics of her own, and those, she hoped, would keep her safe on the journey to come.

The Star made her way to the first port-city that had fallen into darkness, Estervenee, no longer guarded by a Star such as herself. Indeed, she could not help thinking of Marag and its librarians, which she had abandoned. She could only trust that she would unriddle the mystery of the vanishing Stars and restore the sky to its glory before her city's people suffered.

Estervenee's ivory towers were less glorious in the darkness, lit only by the faintest of illumination. At first the Star went to the city's ruler, its twin queens, but they would not receive her, a person of no consequence. Instead of arguing, the Star then made her way amid the shadows, for she had no fear of darkness. Cutpurses and pickpockets saw her, and looked again at the night caught in her hair, and passed her by, knowing better than to interfere with one such as she.

The Star passed amid the opium dens and the gambling houses, where people mourned the loss of their Star, and for the first time she heard of the Magician. "The Magician has stolen the soul of the city," said a beggar as he chewed toothlessly on a hard crust of bread. "The Magician has unlocked a magic great and terrible, and is using it to become greater and more terrible still," said a woman-of-the-walls, keeping watch in case one of Estervenee's enemies took advantage of the darkness to attack. "The Magician is unweaving the very firmament," said a dock worker, deep in their cups because their ship could not navigate the Sea of Dust without the guiding constellations.

Then the Star knew that she must go to the Magician to seek answers, or redress, or revenge.

The ways of Stars, even in mortal shape, are different from the ways of ordinary mortals, and so it was that the Star was able to harness the winds of the Sea to carry her to the Fortress-City of Kvafr. There the guards with their eye-tattoos marked her arrival, for even a Star cannot pass unseen from their uncanny gazes. But she met their looks unflinching, and opened her hand, from which light blazed pure and sweet. Then then bowed to her and let her pass.

The Star walked the labyrinth-walls of Kvafr and asked everyone she passed about the Magician. The guards could tell her only that he had taken their Star, which she already knew. Then she asked to speak to the prisoners.

"People swallowed by Kvafr never speak again," the guards told her, but the Star was insistent. Then they escorted her to the cells and told her that they could offer her no more help.

The cells of Kvafr had no light even during ordinary times, for to sin against the rulers of the Fortress-City was to sin against any hope of daylight. The Star was the first light that any of the prisoners had seen since they were interred. Her light did not blind them, but gave them a curious heartsease--paradoxical, given the reason she had come.

"The Magician," she said, as the prisoners turned their faces toward her one by one. "What can you tell me of him?"

Her intuition had led her well, for a murmur rose up among the prisoners. "He came here once, a long time ago," a one-armed woman said at last. Another prisoner said, "No, that can't be right. He was the only one who ever escaped Kvafr's oubliettes, by turning the walls into air." And a third, ancient of years, said, "The Magician was born here."

The Star asked to see the cell he had once occupied. After unpuzzling the directions the prisoners gave her, all riddles and contradictions, she found the single deepest cell beneath Kvafr. It was empty, of course, but it had an inscription in the wall, written in a language that the Star did not recognize. She made a note of it, so that she could ask someone about it later.

Her next stop was Yarith Witch-Citadel. Here the ruling council of witches received her warmly, offering her tea-of-nettles and delicate flaky pastries, roast goose and confits and other delicacies besides. It did not escape the Star's notice that the witches had great interest in her powers, or that all the food was poisoned.

But poison has no more effect on a Star than it does on a mirror. She excused herself when she wearied of their attempts to entrap her, and flew on wings of magnetism and magic out of their dining room. The Star reassembled herself in the slums of Yarith.

A gang of thief-children saw her and mistook her for a witch, and would have run from her. The Star opened her hand again, shining, and then they knew her true nature. "I only have one question for you," she said. "Where can I find the Magician?"

The thief-children did not know, but they escorted her to a soothsayer who was in hiding from the witches, who regulated all magic jealously. The soothsayer would have bowed before the Star--they recognized her celestial nature--but she raised them up and said, "I am just one piece of my world, as you are of yours." And she asked the soothsayer what they had heard of the Magician.

"He came here a long time ago," the soothsayer said, "to study with the witches. But he grew jealous of their power, or they of his. They quarreled, and he was exiled from the city. That's all I know."

After that, the Star visited the Floating Cities. Here she felt almost welcome, for no one in the Cities trusted their names to anyone, and she, as a Star, had none of her own. Still, even the Floating Cities had their merchant princelings. By means mysterious they had heard of the Star's travels, and they sent a messenger to treat with her.

The messenger was a foppishly-dressed woman, her hair oiled and her throat circled with necklaces of pearl and pyrope, topaz and tourmaline, sword-straight beneath her silk coat. She bore a purse. "My masters," she said, "will offer you this and more if you will restore the Cities' Star."

The Star couldn't help it: she smiled. "What good does your coin do me?" she asked.

"Don't be so quick to turn it down," the messenger returned. She opened the purse, and light spilled out of it, moonlight captured from days past. "Perhaps even a Star can make use of radiance."

"I would look for all my kindred regardless," the Star said.

"Then it is an easy bargain to accept, is it not?"

The Star shook her head. "Give me a purse of regular coin instead. That I will accept, if your masters give me leave to continue my search in this your city."

The messenger was nonplussed, but she had come prepared. She reached into her coat and produced a different purse, this one heavy with coin. "Take it and go," she said. "And hurry. The Magician grows ever more powerful."

The Star ventured upon the boats, all lashed to each other, that made the Floating Cities. In truth, she could have walked easily upon the Sea of Dust if she had cared to. But she didn't wish to unsettle her hosts.

Instead of visiting the Floating Cities' merchants or warriors, the Star made her way to the smallest of the boats, the poorest of the fishers. "Tell me," she asked the fisherfolk, "where can I find the Magician?"

"The Magician is hiding in the center of the Sea of Dust," said a scarred fisher. Another one said, "One time our nets caught him, and a storm raged in the Sea for seven days and seven nights." A third said, "Sometimes the dust-divers see lights down there in the Sea. That must be where he is keeping the rest of your kind."

"Thank you," the Star said. She offered them the purse of coins, despite their protests. "It does me no good," she said, "but perhaps you can make some use of it."

She had one last stop to make before confronting the Magician. At this point she already had a suspicion as to his motives. But she wanted the confirmation.

Last but not least the Star went to Marag the Black, whose name was truer than ever beneath a sky with no Stars left, and only a sad, lonely Moon. Here, at least, she was courteously received, and without artifice or deception. When the Star arrived at the Head Librarian's office, he lit a lantern powered by a captured mote of sunlight, even though the Star would have been happy to provide her own glow.

"I thought you would be returning here," the Librarian said, a little sadly. "We had hoped to see you before now."

"I took the path I needed to take," the Star said. "I need something translated."

"Of course," the Librarian said. "There is no language of the world that our scholars cannot decipher." He provided the Star a sheet of paper, an inkwell, a dip pen.

The Star wrote the inscription she had seen on the wall of the Magician's cell. Her hand was neat, her reproduction precise. She knew her memory was excellent.

The Librarian's face twisted into a grimace when he saw what she had written. "Ah, my dear...that's from one of the patois spoken among dock workers. Spelled phonetically, at that. It doesn't _have_ a proper written form. Not a true language, really."

The Star looked at him sadly, but he didn't notice. "Tell me what it says."

"'Freedom,'" the Librarian translated.

"Thank you," the Star said.

The Star departed from Marag the Black, once the city she had guarded so diligently, making her way to the shore of the Sea of Dust. She took one last long look back at Marag, its buildings with their elaborate columns, its libraries framed by ivy and osmanthus. It might be the last time she saw it.

Then the Star stepped into the Sea of Dust. The motes of dust parted for her, sparkling in the light from her hand. Deeper and deeper she descended, until there was nothing above her but dust, and nothing beneath her but dust, and nothing to either side but dust.

The fisherfolk had not lied to her. The longer she walked, tunneling her way through the Sea, the more she saw lights ahead, a subterranean constellation. Her steps quickened in her eagerness to solve the mystery of her lost kindred.

At last the dust fell away, and the Star reached a simple dwelling within the buried fossil of a plesiosaur. "If you are the Magician," the Star called out, "I have come to parley."

A man came out of the dwelling to greet her. The robes he wore, of fine satin, could not hide his gauntness, or the scars, or the fact that one of his hands was a prosthetic carved from dragonbone and animated by strange necromancies. But his eyes were kind.

"It's not starlight that you keep down here," the Star said, sad once more. Now that she was closer, she could tell that the lights were magelights, fueled by the Magician's art, and not a sign of her vanished kindred.

"You are the only Star here," the Magician said.

"Then my siblings?"

"One by one I went to them," the Magician said. "One by one I showed them the injustices that festered in their cities. And one by one they left their safe positions in the celestial realm, to walk amid their people, and give what comfort they could."

"Why did they not come to greet me?" she cried.

The Magician looked at her with great sympathy. "Perhaps," he said, "they were afraid that you would judge them for their choice. You were always a very dutiful Star, they all said."

"And the one who shot my messenger-bird?" she asked.

He knew that too. "One of the merchant princelings of the Floating Cities," the Magician said. "They dreaded the thought of you contacting your kindred."

"Why did you not come to me, then?" the Star said.

"You're here now, aren't you?" The Magician's smile was rueful. "You can always go back to the celestial realm, you know. You could be a queen among Stars, now that you are the only one. All the cities would pay homage to you; they would send tribute of incense and prayer for your favor."

"No," said the Star. "There is more than one kind of light than the kind that shines from the heavens. I will depart from you, and walk among the people of Marag, and bring them what heartsease I can."

"Then my work has not been for nothing," said the Magician. "Come visit me from time to time, and tell me of your progress."

"I will surely do so," said the Star.

The Star walked out of the Sea of Dust, and back to Marag. And this time she did not visit the Head Librarian, but traversed the alleys, the jails, the orphanages. And from that night on there was light in Marag again.


End file.
